From an epistemological and psychological perspective, we would expect the most mendacious president to have the most tenuous relationship with science. President Trump never fails to disappoint when it comes to matters scientific.
Although Felonious Trump takes pride in his uncle who was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, our 47th president has a science IQ that could well be in the negatives. In his first term, Trump gave us sharpie-gate wherein he determined the course of a hurricane based upon politically expedient lines. He floated the use of sodium hypochlorite as a treatment for Covid, and encouraged his administration’s health officials to investigate the possibilities.[1]
We might judge him harshly for his first-term alliances with quack Covid denialists and peddlers of quack nostrums. More recently, we have seen Felonious Trump forge alliances with the likes of supplement advocate Dr. Oz and lawsuit industry foot soldier, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (“Junior”). The alliance between Trump and Junior is especially strange, given Kennedy’s long-standing participation in the lawsuit industry and his demonization of pharmaceutical and other manufacturers.
On March 6, 2025, in a performative speech to Congress,[2] Felonious Trump provided further evidence of his low science I.Q. The speech contained a boast about cost-cutting begat from ignorance and stupidity. The president took credit for cutting $8 million for research “for making mice transgender — this is real.”[3]
Although it would be tempting to argue that the transgender mice were taking over laboratories because Trump supporters were eating cats, the reality is that there was no spending on supposedly transgender mice. No Mickeys became Minnies, on the watch of the National Institutes of Health. Trump had misrepresented cuts to research involving transgenic mice, mice with foreign DNA, for the purpose of conducting targeted experimental research.Transgenic mice were developed in the 1980s, and have become a standard tool in medical research.[4]
Childhood Cancer
There can hardly be a more emotional issue than childhood cancer, so we should not be surprised that Felonious Trump would exploit the issue for political gain. In the course of his March 6th address, Trump announced that a 13 year old child, Devarjaye (“DJ”) Daniel, would become an honorary Secret Service agent. DJ is a survivor of a cancer of his brain and spine. According to Trump:
“DJ’s doctors believe his cancer likely came from a chemical he was exposed to when he was younger. Since 1975, rates of child cancer have increased by more than 40 percent.”
Given that all living beings and the planet that we inhabit are all made of chemicals, it is hard to know exactly what Trump was trying to say. Presumably, he was channeling the environmentalism and chemophobia of the progressive left and its darling, Junior. But what chemicals, when, where, and in what doses? The one thing I know is that neither Trump nor Junior knows. Trump went on to give a shout out to Junior:
“Reversing this trend is one of the top priorities for our new presidential commission to Make America Healthy Again chaired by our new secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. With a name Kennedy, you would have thought everybody over here would have been cheering. How quickly they forget!”
Just as Professor Trump of M.I.T. has a moronic nephew, so did the late President Kennedy. Could it be regression to the mean?
Trump was, no doubt, channeling the chemophobia usually disseminated by the radical left. What are chemicals? Everything is a chemical, but which ones was he indicting.
In a big tell, Felonious Trump did not call on Congress to allocate more funding for scientific inquiry into the “chemicals” that might have caused DJ’s cancer, or for treating childhood cancer. Cancer in children is rare, but it is the leading cause of disease morbidity among children and adolescents past infancy. Firearms are a significant cause of death as well. But has the rate of childhood cancer gone up by 40% since 1975? Because of changes in reporting methods, assessing this 50 year period is difficult. There are, however, good SEER data for the last 30 or so years that show, for nervous system cancers, there is no important increase.
The SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results) data comes from a program set up by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to collect and study data on cancer incidence and mortality in the United States. The data for DJ’s cancer for the relevant time period, 1992 – 2022, are available from the NCI, and the NCI’s website. The chart below shows the incidence rate of childhood brain and nervious system cancers (ages 0 to 19):[5]
A group outside the National Cancer Institute reported its analysis over a long period, 45 years, for SEER data.[6] Looking at the most important specific cancer types, the group found that some cancer types increased, but nothing remotely close to the 40% for the cancer that afflicted young DJ.
In this group’s analysis, the incidence of childhood cancer increased from 14.23 cases per 100,000 (for 1975-1979) to 18.89 (for 2010-2019), but they noted the obvious variability among relevant cancers and the potential bias from improved diagnoses and data registration over time. Most important, the authors noted that the “underlying causes remain unclear.”
Autism
Despite his first-term success in Operation Warp Speed to encourage the development of Covid vaccines and to promote their distribution, Felonious Trump has run away from one of his few successes ever since he was booed by his MAGATs at a political rally.[7] Indeed, Trump has long been anti-vax adjacent, but reluctant to acknowledge his superstitions publicly. In a conversation with Junior, back in July 2024, both Trump and Junior let their hair down and revealed their anti-vax convictions.[8]
In the past, Trump had been cagey (and dishonest) about his anti-vax beliefs. Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced author of a retracted 1998 article, attended one of Trump’s first inaugural balls, which occasioned numerous public denunciations that pushed Trump’s inner quack into hiding for the while.[9] In his second term, after being groomed by Junior, Trump is now unrestrained by sober second thoughts:
“Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong. As an example, not long ago, and you can’t even believe these numbers, one in 10,000 children have autism. One in 10,000. And now it’s one in 36. There’s something wrong. One in 36. Think of that. So we’re going to find out what it is and there’s nobody better than Bobby and all of the people that are working with you. You have the best to figure out what is going on. OK, Bobby, good luck. It’s a very important job.”
No, you really cannot believe those numbers because the diagnostic categories and criteria have changed, as have the social connotations of having an autistic child has changed. And so has the average age of fathers at the time of conception. Turning the issue over to Junior, who has labored for decades in the lawsuit industry, is hardly likely to yield any meaningful knowledge.
The result of Trump’s delegation to Junior was highly predictable. The vaccine autism hypothesis has been extensively explored,[10] and a disinterested observer might think doing another study would be a wonderful example of waste in government.[11]
And yet within a couple of days of Trump’s congressional address, Reuters reported that the government plans a large study on autism and vaccines.[12] The exact nature of the study and Junior’s role in the study remain unclear.[13]
Recent news reports suggest that the Centers for Disease Control intend to search for correlations between vaccines and autism in the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), a collaboration between CDC and various healthcare organizations across the country that monitor vaccine safety and study rare and serious adverse events.[14] The CDC website has a link to a white paper on studying childhood immunization, prepared by the VSD.[15] The so-called white paper is undated and appears to have been prepared almost 10 years ago.
The hyped claim that vaccines cause autism was advanced by a British physician, Andrew Wakefield, who has since been stripped of his license. Wakefield blamed vaccines in his 1998 Lancet paper, which has since been retracted.[16] Wakefield fled his native England for the warm embrace of MAGAT nation, where he could continue to agitate against vaccines. In 2017, Wakefield attended one of Trump’s inaugural balls, which provoked a quackwatch hue and cry.[17]
[1] “Coronavirus: Outcry after Trump suggests injecting disinfectant as treatment,” BBC (Apr. 24, 2020).
[2] “Remarks by President Trump in Joint Address to Congress,” The White House (Mar. 6, 2025).
[3] Miles Klee, “Trump Decried Millions Spent Making Mice Transgender: It was Cancer and Asthma Research,” Rolling Stone (Mar. 5, 2025); Kiona N. Smith, “This Is What’s Behind Trump’s Uproar Over ‘Transgender Mice,” Forbes (Mar. 07, 2025).
[4] See generally National Research Council. Sharing Laboratory Resources: Genetically Altered Mice (1994).
[5] “Cancer Stat Facts: Childhood Brain and Other Nervous System Cancer (Ages 0–19),” N.C.I. (last visited Mar. 10, 2025); see also “Cancer in Children and Adolescents,” NCI (last visited Mar. 10, 2025).
[6] Iyad Sultan, Ahmad S. Alfaar, Yaseen Sultan, Zeena Salman, Ibrahim Qaddoumi, “Trends in childhood cancer: Incidence and survival analysis over 45 years of SEER data,” 20 PLoS One e0314592 (2025).
[7] See, e.g., Dan Merica, “Trump met with boos after revealing he received Covid-19 booster,” CNN (Dec. 21, 2021).
[8] Rachel Treisman, “Leaked video shows Trump criticizing vaccines on phone with RFK Jr.,” Nat’l Public Ratio (July 16, 2024).
[9] See, e.g., Casey Ross, “Andrew Wakefield appearance at Trump inaugural ball triggers social media backlash,” Stat News (Jan. 21, 2017).
[10] Kathleen Stratton, et al., eds., Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality (Instit. of Med. 2012).
[11] Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “A Skeptical G.O.P. Senator Makes His Peace with Kennedy,” N.Y. Times (Mar. 5, 2025).
[12] Dan Levine and Leah Douglas, “US CDC plans study into vaccines and autism, sources say,” Reuters (Mar. 9, 2025).
[13] Judy George, “CDC Plans Large Study on Autism and Vaccines, Report Says — HHS Secretary Kennedy’s role in this research is unclear,” MedPage Today (Mar. 7, 2025).
[14] Emily Baumgaertner Nunn & Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “C.D.C. Will Investigate Debunked Link Between Vaccines and Autism,” N.Y. Times (Mar. 7, 2025).
[15] Jason M. Glanz, et al., for the Vaccine Safety Datalink, “White Paper on Studying the Safety of the Childhood Immunization Schedule,” CDC.
[16] Andrew J. Wakefield, S.H. Murch, A Anthony, J. Linnell, D.M. Casson, M. Malik, M. Berelowitz, A.P. Dhillon, M.A. Thomson, P. Harvey, A. Valentine, S.E. Davies, J.A. Walker-Smith, “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children,” 351 Lancet 637 (1998).
[17] Casey Ross, “Andrew Wakefield appearance at Trump inaugural ball triggers social media backlash,” Stat News (Jan. 21, 2017).
